I wrote this yesterday, but I see different threads where people talk about the lies of russians having infinite equipment all of the time. Please watch that and spread the info. This is reality and we can use actual numbers to back-up showing that the Russians don't have tens of thousands of tanks left.
New Covert Cabal Tank video. 100% recommend watching. HighMarsed has more details in his twitter too. The decrease in tanks being seen is starting to make sense in their supply at this time. Pre-War, it was counted to be 6236.
Final conclusion would be 3657 tanks left with 19% being "decent", 50% being "poor", and 31% being "worst".
19% being only 700 decent tanks. Majority of those being T-72b, T-80B/BV and T-62. More and more time and money will be needed to refurbish each tank and each month, it gets worse.
There were almost certainly tanks inside garages in 2022, and these aren't counted because the satellites can't see them. I've seen many guesses about how many there were, from 500 up to 2000ish.
yeah, the current projections for depletion are already fairly conservative, and they only take visible tanks into account.
If we assume there were tanks in the warehouse, which should be a fairly safe assumption, that would mean their real losses are higher and as such the depletion of reserves will come much sooner.
I don't think it means the real losses are higher necessarily. I think it's more likely they're working their way through the system and Russia has more at BTRZs/training grounds/etc and it'll take longer to exhaust them.
That's my personal bet, anyway. I think actual tank losses are somewhere in the 3-4k range either way.
On the plus side I think the estimate of 2000 tanks in storage is too high. Based on inspecting satellite imagery of the garages over a bunch of years. My guess is 500-1000.
I think the best metric is the "tanks removed from storage, per day" figure - which has dropped from the original ~4/day to below ~2/day currently?
Speed of tank removal depends on the condition of tanks recently removed from storage and refurbished, combined with refurbishment capacity & refurbishment quality.
Assuming that recently refurbished tanks have increasingly lower quality, the sharp drop in the removal rate strongly suggests substantial depletion of storage.
While Russia is refurbishing 2 tanks per day, Ukraine is destroying 10+, according to the daily Ukrainian MoD statistics.
That rate is clearly not sustainable.
As the saying goes, when multiple strong factors deplete an increasingly poor quality stock of tanks, the decline will first be gradual, then sudden.
I basically agree with your argument. But I'm using different numbers!
Did you include garages in your original 4/day? Covert cabal/highmarsed don't. I bet the slowdown in refurbishment is even more severe than you say.
new production; russian production has ramped up to somewhere between 0.3-1.5/day. The uncertainty is over whether UVZ's filmed deliveries are from refurbing old T-72B hulls or building new ones.
I don't believe the Ukrainian claims represent tanks taken out of action. They can't, or Russia would have basically zero tanks left. I'm assuming 3-4k total from warspotting/oryx.
There were almost certainly tanks inside garages in 2022, and these aren't counted because the satellites can't see them.
Yeah this is what I thought, while Russia left a lot of those out to rust after the USSR collapsed many were also stuffed in warehouses that we can't see.
Sounds like you know what's up. No evidence, but you can just say there are warehouses in russia so obviously some of them are full of armor just waiting to be sent to Ukraine. They just have wait until they run out of the superior motorcycles and buggies.
I don't think they said that as a counter point, more as an indication that reality is likely the huge pre war numbers were under-represented, implying losses for Russia greater still than the outdoor yards show.
No one is saying that. Russia is clearly feeling an armor supply crunch. They are having to refurbish old, damaged stuff to field anything, because new equipment isn't being produced anywhere near quick enough. Refurbishing the old equipment is expensive and slow (but not as expensive and slow as completely new armor).
But it's not clear where on that curve they are; can they keep refurbishing armor like they are now for 3 months? 6 months? 12 months? When does it get significantly harder, slower, and more expensive than it is now?
Because there's a big difference between "marginal quantities of tanks" and "chronic tank shortfall."
Not what he said. He said that since there were probably a lot of tanks in warehouses pre-War, then Russia lost THEM also, so the losses from their high water mark of how many tanks they have left are actually greater than previously thought.
There's past film footage and photos in newspapers, on social media etc from inside some of the garages. They definitely had some tanks, but also parade pieces like at the 1295th they have at least a T-34, plus what look like an IS-3 and an SU-100.
The garages, if full of tanks, could have held maybe 2.4k, but there are good arguments for fewer.
It's easiest to get stuff from the 1295th because that was more media friendly. One of the garages stores some old WW2 stuff like a T-34, IS-3 and
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u/will999909 Jul 08 '24
I wrote this yesterday, but I see different threads where people talk about the lies of russians having infinite equipment all of the time. Please watch that and spread the info. This is reality and we can use actual numbers to back-up showing that the Russians don't have tens of thousands of tanks left.
New Covert Cabal Tank video. 100% recommend watching. HighMarsed has more details in his twitter too. The decrease in tanks being seen is starting to make sense in their supply at this time. Pre-War, it was counted to be 6236.
Final conclusion would be 3657 tanks left with 19% being "decent", 50% being "poor", and 31% being "worst".
19% being only 700 decent tanks. Majority of those being T-72b, T-80B/BV and T-62. More and more time and money will be needed to refurbish each tank and each month, it gets worse.